Miracles

Born in Bradford in 1984, Steven Frayne was originally taught magic tricks by his grandfather, developing a love for the art that never left. He was given his previous moniker after being called a “dynamo” while performing in New York in 2001 alongside esteemed names, David Blaine and David Copperfield. Launching his career professionally in 2004, Steven acquired celebrity fans after performing magic for them, footage of which was then uploaded to YouTube. In 2011, he launched the TV series Dynamo: Magician Impossible, which ran for four seasons totalling 17 episodes.

He decided to say goodbye to the name Dynamo for good with the Sky Original special, entitled Dynamo Is Dead in December 2023. In the climax to that show, aired live, Steven literally buried himself alive, essentially burying the Dynamo name before re-emerging as Steven Frayne. Speaking on the Diary of a CEO podcast, he explained: “I had so many problems that I couldn't figure out how to even solve one of them. I felt if I'm not here, then everybody else might be happier. I realised then the Dynamo we know, it needed to die, and I'm finally feeling it again. Now I just need to get magic back in my life.”

In his new special, Miracles, Steven does just that by turning his attention to the everyday heroes who perform acts of extraordinary kindness, or miracles, on a daily basis. Travelling the length and breadth of the country he unearths the real gems who help to lift those around them and celebrates their selflessness and positive attitudes by involving each of them in his urban and street magic.

Sky Post Production worked hand in hand with Expectation TV once again to bring Steven's unique brand of magic to the screen. The BAFTA nomination in the Entertainment Craft Team category is just reward for the brilliant execution of a terrific, creative vision!

Vickie Mansell – Post Producer

It was such a joy to welcome back Steven Frayne and the team at Expectation TV to Sky Post for another epic production: Miracles. Following the success of Dynamo is Dead, this new film took a different path. Steven journeyed across the country, returning to his roots with stunning street magic and heartfelt encounters with inspiring local heroes. The film culminated in a breathtaking final miracle - proof that miracles really do happen!

From a Post Production perspective, the brief was straightforward. However, rather than resting on our laurels, we built on the strong working relationship and creative shorthand already established with Steven and the Expectation team which allowed Jon Slade, Mark Mulcaster and Tom Nursey to push boundaries and explore new ideas in the Online, Grade and Mix.

Creatively, the goal was to give the film a brighter, lighter tone compared to the previous film and, thanks to ongoing collaboration, we had a wider scope to be creative and bounce ideas in all areas of Post, resulting in a fresh and dynamic final product.

Tom Nursey – Re-recording Mixer

I’d worked with Steven Frayne before on his last special, Dynamo Is Dead, which was a great experience and meant I already had a good working relationship with him and also with the Showrunner/Executive Producer, Rowland French. I was also keen to meet Jon Richards, the director, so we could chat through the brief and his vision for the show. Luckily, I had access to a rough-cut before our meeting, so I came armed with some creative ideas of my own to bounce off his. Jon’s background is from programmes like Top Gear and TV magic shows for Derren Brown which meant he had a really clear sense of the sound he was after - grounded in reality and cinematic enough to emphasise the magic but with a bit of flair. He was really open to creative ideas, especially since the show leans so heavily on Steven’s magic. We had a few chats before the mix so I had a good sense of where I could run a bit wild and push things creatively, and where I needed to keep it more straightforward. It never felt like I was being helicopter directed, but I was also never left guessing what the vision was. It was a great balance - freedom to experiment, but with a clear direction.

One of the key things we wanted to highlight was Steven’s return to his street magic roots. That meant striking a balance between realism and wonder - and the idea that this wasn’t simply a ‘magic show’ where the audience is just watching Steven perform - we wanted the viewers to feel like they were right there on the street and experiencing it with the crowd. So, the focus wasn’t just on the magic itself, but on the reactions and energy of the people surrounding him.

Getting the balance right between grounding the show in reality whilst emphasising the magic was one of the most fun and creative challenges on the project - and a lot of that was thanks to the lovely edit from Adam Hutchings. The show was filmed across various UK locations, and we wanted each one to have its own sonic characteristics without sounding like we were jumping between different worlds. To achieve that I leaned heavily into the SFX edit, layering atmospheres and background sounds to really bed the dialogue into each location. I used a mix of library effects and mono wildtracks recorded on-site, which helped create a rich 5.1 sound bed while keeping everything feeling grounded in its respective city.

One idea I pitched to Jon and Steven was around the transitions from the interstitials back to the street scenes. For the interstitials - which were the slo-mo travel shots in between set-ups - we went the other way. I used filters and reverbs to give them an ethereal feel. The contrast between the grounded street magic and the dreamy style transitions gave the show a really nice rhythm. Since we liked the interstitials being more ethereal and the street scenes being so grounded, I wanted the audio to reflect that shift and match the visuals. I automated the wet/dry signal on an in-series reverb to gradually move from dreamy to real. At the same time, I faded up the SFX atmospheres and used an automated filter to make it feel like reality was slowly bleeding in. It worked really nicely with the expanding letterboxing effect they used on the vision to transition out of the interstitials.

The biggest challenge was the “fly on the wall” filming style. Steven only performed each trick once per location, so what we got was what we got! That meant limited time to mic up contributors and often relying on the boom for audience reactions. Thankfully, Paul Miller (the location sound recordist) was on it - he always managed to catch the key reactions with the boom. Still, with a fixed radio mic and a moving boom, phasing was a regular issue. Thankfully, Auto-Align Post 2 made light work of that! Another challenge was noisy dialogue. These were real-world locations - open, untreated, and unpredictable. Plugins like SuperTone Clear helped clean things up, but I was careful not to overdo it. Bedding the dialogue into the mono wildtrack SFX was key to keeping everything sounding natural and not over-processed, while retaining control of the different elements. 

Having Mark, the Colourist, and Jon Slade, the Online Editor, close at hand made the project an absolute dream. Everything was so much smoother - not just for us, but for the client too. They could be involved in every part of the process whenever they needed to, without having to hop between studios or cities. Internally, it also meant that our workflows were tight. Media and rushes were shared centrally, so we could easily pass updated mixes and visuals between departments. It kept everything moving and made the whole experience feel seamless.

I’m absolutely delighted with the response to Miracles, especially given the heartwarming message it portrays - that everyday people are the real magic. The BAFTA nomination still gives me butterflies. I think this is one of the mixes I’m proudest of, and I can’t wait to see where Steven takes things next.

Mark Mulcaster – Colourist

Last year I was fortunate enough to work on Dynamo is Dead, a 70-minute show which culminated in the live broadcast of a magic stunt during which Dynamo was buried alive and then reborn, reclaiming his original name of Steven Frayne. For this new show, Miracles, Steven embarks on a tour around the UK introducing us to a variety of unsung heroes; a 10-year-old who runs a food bank, a formerly homeless man providing hot meals for those living on the streets, Street Angels who patrol from dusk til dawn, and a football coach who runs a team for kids with Downs Syndrome,  all of whom have selflessly made their communities a better place to live. That, he explains, is the real magic.

It was great to be able to work with creative team at Expectation TV again, but it was the first time working with director Jon Richards whose passion and creative drive for the project were both infectious and creatively inspiring from the very start. Miracles had a run time of over 60 minutes and about 1500 cuts with the production utilising four main cameras and some additional cameras for the finale “Miracle”.  Jon had a really clear idea of how he wanted the show to look; lots of colour, nice and bright yet with a style and language of its own. For this we ended up creating a base look which had blue\green blacks and warm skin tones, without feeling overly like a two-tone wash. I wanted to ensure that we maintained colour separation throughout.

The show is a celebration of the altruism of people in the community and so we wanted to ensure that the grade felt bright and inspiring, yet with an urban/grungy twist which was a nod to Steven’s street magic background. The notion of keeping things bright was a deliberate act with the magic as it would be very easy to obscure what’s going on with an image which is dark and moody. By brightening the image we were inviting scrutiny, being honest with the viewer and clearly saying we don’t have anything to hide. We had 18 different set-ups to bring together, with each having a slightly different look and feel. There were night shoots on the streets as well as shoots in a boxing gym, a classroom, a sports hall, city soup kitchen, a Dogs Trust centre and the finale magic trick on an industrial park in West London. That meant having to have a range of treatments for the different filmed environments with all their differing challenges. Hospital wards, for example, don’t tend to be the best lighting for TV and are usually very tungsten heavy. There was also the additional challenge of large windows with plenty of daylight spilling into the picture as well. One of the commissioner notes from the offline viewings was to brighten up that environment and to try and eliminate the yellow/beige appearance which we managed to achieve.

The show is broken up with travelling interstitials which would typically be Steven on a train travelling between cities. As something of a colour palette/palate-cleanser, these had to have a different look and feel and we pushed them quite heavily in the Grade. Jon and I discussed basing the look for these on Holga and Lomography photography which is a genre of photography in which the images are captured on low-budget, vintage or toy cameras with cheap mass-produced lenses. These tend to have all sorts of analogue type flaws such as light leaks, grain and heavy vignetting. We created a generalised film feel to the image with dense, richly saturated colours and let some elements run into the clip a bit. Finally, we added some chromatic aberrations and this was then built on in the online.

The finale “miracle” was a night shoot where Steven defied gravity and walked on air to light up a giant Christmas tree. This was actually graded first as we wanted to dial in an epic vibe to the look and to spend time crafting the image so that you could pick out Steven when he’s on top of the building even from the wider angle establishing shots. As with all of the set-ups a lot of time was taken to ensure that around the tricks the cutting between cameras was as seamless as possible. This is especially important as whilst a cut is a literal change of reality, we wanted to ensure that it went unnoticed by the viewer and that all their attention was on the magic.

Miracles was a really fun show to work on with a great production team. We pushed the initial look and had fun with the visuals whilst all the time trying to remain faithful to the original image we came-up with without being restricted at the same time. I was really pleased with how the show came out and with its BAFTA nomination.

Jon Slade – Online

Miracles wrapped up another busy year for finishing post at Sky, in much the same way as Dynamo is Dead had done the previous year. Personally, I’d been involved in a lot of archive-heavy documentaries throughout the year, so it was nice to be working with high-quality, original rushes for a change. For the Online, there was a little bit of stabilising and sharpening to do as the style of the show was deliberately gritty and handheld. Some shots, particularly evident in one of the low-light nighttime scenes, had dead pixels that needed repairing - and a couple of scenes needed some compliance blurring.

We were delivering in HD, so I utilised the UHD and 4K source material to remake the Avid resize effects from the offline sequence using Frame Flex to preserve the source quality. Montages between scenes incorporated anamorphic shots so needed an animated letterbox to squeeze into vision for those, but light trail and text elements would blend over the top of those and that required some in-Avid compositing. Additionally, there was a 17:9 aspect ratio throughout which the director had already opted for.

Because of the turnaround time and scheduling, I did most of the online using ungraded pictures which is not entirely uncommon and has the added benefit of allowing the Grade, Audio and Online to all run concurrently, communicating with each other should amendments (or "unlocking") be required. Stacking effects and online work on the tracks above the ungraded sequence meant that when the graded pictures finally came to me, I was able to simply slot the grade, and subsequently a tweaked re-grade, straight into the edit whilst retaining all the Online elements. A combination of this and the flexibility of using Baselight internally meant that I could turn a ‘log’ Online into a fully-finished master quite quickly.